Mg Siegler

MG Siegler is a general partner at Google Ventures, where he primarily focuses on seed and early-stage investments. He has been deeply involved in the startup space since 2005, first as a web developer, then as a writer, and most recently as an investor and advisor.

He’s currently spending time in London to help get the Google Ventures Europe organization up and running. He remains active, looking at new investments in the U.S. as well.

Before joining Google Ventures, MG was a founding partner of CrunchFund, an early-stage investment fund. Prior to that, he reported on the startup world as a writer for both TechCrunch and VentureBeat. MG still writes a weekly column for TechCrunch on top of writing on his own sites and from time-to-time doing movie reviews in haiku.

Originally from Ohio, MG graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor before moving out west to work in Hollywood. One day, he will write that killer screenplay.

Latest from Mg Siegler

Just about two years ago, I went off the deep end. I had come home early from an event in an effort to do something responsible: email. I was on the road and knew the situation would be dire (since I had not been checking my email all day). I was wrong. It was a disaster. It may as well have been Inbox Trillion. There was no way I could get through it all with my sanity intact. So I did the… Read More

“This is not a Facebook Phone.” Yeah, whatever. The HTC First is the first phone that has Facebook partnering up with an OEM to bake an Android pie with Facebook Home filling, so I’m calling it the Facebook Phone. There will be more. This is just the first. And guess what?
It’s really good. Read More

Facebook is absolutely, positively, 100 percent not working on a phone.
The first rule of tech news remains intact: when a company says they’re definitely not doing something, it’s as sure a sign as you can get that they will eventually do said thing. Read More

If judged by my Twitter stream last week, the shutdown of Google Reader is the biggest story ever in the history of news. Of course, the reality is that Google is likely shutting down the product for a good reason: relatively few people used it, with less using it over time. More wood, fewer arrows, and all that.
But that doesn’t mean this move isn’t a mistake for a couple reasons. Read More

This is the first Android device I would feel comfortable using on a regular basis.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to, but I would be just fine with it.
If I had to boil down my thoughts about the Nexus 4 into two sentences, those would be them. Read More

The RapGenius breakdowns of recent Andrew Mason and Warren Buffet statements by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz are, well, genius. And they got me thinking back to some of my favorite blog posts along the same lines: breaking down corporate speak, vagueness, or pure bullshit line-by-line. Strolling down memory lane, I landed upon this post from June of 2010, in which I broke down some high… Read More

“Wait. That’s a touchscreen?!”
That wasn’t the first thought that popped into my head when I started to use the Chromebook Pixel — it was about the tenth. But that’s only because it seemed impossible that a screen this nice could be a touchscreen. Of course, being that nice, comes with a price. Read More

When talking about Apple’s rise from near-bankruptcy to become the most valuable company in the world, people often credit the amazing string of products from the iMac to the iPod to the iPhone to the iPad. And rightfully so. But just as important was another piece of the puzzle that ensured said products would find mainstream appeal and acted as an accelerant for Apple’s success… Read More

What I’m about to say is undoubtedly going to piss some of you off. And that’s fine. Because in a few years, I’ll be right and you’ll look silly.
While everyone is focused on the next generation video game consoles from Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft — the latter two of which should be coming later this year — Apple is going to dominate them all. And it… Read More

The year was 2004. I had just graduated college and my old Gateway mini tower PC was on its last legs. I was about to move out to California to begin my life. My parents asked what I wanted as a present before I left. But they already knew the answer. Dude, I was getting a Dell.
I went online and customized the hell out of an Inspiron 8600. The price tag was well over $3,000. The thing was… Read More

A few days ago, I read Nilay Patel’s review of the Pebble smartwatch for The Verge. Like many others, I bought a Pebble on Kickstarter, and I can’t wait to try it out myself. But one part of Patel’s review stuck out at me in particular:
Any incoming notification will quietly buzz the Pebble and light up the screen. Frankly, it’s great — being able to see… Read More

You know the drill, Apple posts a record $54.5 billion in revenue…
…and the stock tanks 10 percent in after-hours trading.
I mean. Fifty four and a half billion dollars. I went ahead and did the math: that’s an annual run-rate of $218 billion dollars (yes, I know Q1 is the holiday quarter, so it tends to be much larger than the others — but don’t underestimate… Read More

In The Lord of the Rings, when Sauron’s forces capture Gollum, they torture him in Mordor but are only able to get two things out of him: “Shire” and “Baggins”. Over the past few days, we’ve had similar frustrations in trying to track down the content of the Facebook event taking place this coming Tuesday. Despite hounding a number of people who might be in… Read More

CES attendee, why are you here? Are you hoping to see the latest and greatest gadget? Have you been here the past few years? Have you noticed you’ll find no such gadget anywhere near CES?
And if it were here, would it matter? Do such gadgets ever get released? Or are they figments of some marketing wizard’s imagination? Have you seen the press release? Have you noticed there is… Read More

We all know the “four horsemen” of tech: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. These are the companies that pretty much everyone agrees will shape the foreseeable future of the tech sector. In some circles, that list makes waves for who is not included: Microsoft. But any rational thinker (meaning those outside of Redmond or anyone who hasn’t made a career as a .Net… Read More

Yesterday, we ran a big story: Is Apple Plotting A Route To A Waze Acquisition? Rumours On The Road Point To Yes. That’s huge news for a few reasons: Apple rarely makes startup acquisitions — Waze is a hot startup with good buzz — the Apple Maps fiasco — the list goes on. But there’s just one little problem: the deal isn’t actually happening.
That… Read More

Modern Apple owes pretty much everything to the iMac. Yes, it was the iPod and later the iPhone and iPad that took the company to new, almost unimaginable heights. But as everyone knows, the company was at death’s door when Steve Jobs unveiled the “Bondi Blue” iMac in 1998. The iMac saved Apple, giving the company the time to do everything else that followed.
But as we… Read More

The real world: Quit, verb, to leave (a place), usually permanently.
The internet: Quit, verb, to threaten to leave as loudly as possible, usually over something stupid, then do nothing.
Some days I feel like the blogosphere is full of paranoid attention whores. Other days, I’m sure of it. Today is one of those days. Read More

We happen to live in a massive time of transition. The PC market that has dominated computing for the past few decades is decaying while mobile computing is soaring — with the only limit in sight being the total number of people on the planet. As a result, startups have been gradually shifting their focus from web-first to mobile-first. It’s the reason why I stay up late at… Read More

In three short weeks it will be 2013. Someone may want to send a fax to Flickr and Twitter to let them know.
Over the past couple of days, both of these services have pulled a move straight out of 2010: they launched new versions of their mobile apps with — get this — filters. Filters! These guys have millions of dollars and thousands of employees at their disposal and this is the… Read More